The Dictionary of Italian Collocations: Design and Integration in an Online

Learning Environment

Stefania Spina

University for Foreigners Perugia, Italia

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The Dictionary of Italian Collocations

Part of APRIL project (“Personalised web environment for language learning”)

NLP resources as a support for the lexical competence of students of Italian within a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE).

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Presentation outline

background and motivation reference corpus methodology dictionary compilation integration within VLE

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Background

Complexity of MWU: different syntactic and semantic profiles prototypical features:

1. semantic (non-)compositionality2. (non-)substitutability of components by semantically similar

words 3. (non-)insertion of external items

continuum rather than definite categories

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Motivation: collocations in SLA

improve learners fluency examples from Italian leaner corpora

preoccupata per l’esame vado a prendere una doccia (Vietnam) Fare la doccia “take a shower”

ho dimenticato la macchina di fotografia (China) Macchina fotografica “camera”

non-native speakers and L2 vocabulary: first single words, then more extended chunks

trend to overuse the creative combination of isolated words Sinclair’s open choice principle

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DICI

collocations require specific pedagogical attention

Dictionary of Italian Collocations (DICI) it is corpus-based; it is a learner-oriented tool: list of the most

common Italian collocations, classified on a frequency basis;

it is also based on statistical methodologies (dispersion in the different textual genres represented in the corpus).

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Reference corpus Perugia corpus: POS-tagged, lemmatized

Textual genres

fiction

non-fiction

web

academic prose

press

language of administration

television programs

spoken texts

TOTAL: 18 million words

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Extraction based on POS sequences Analysis of existing list of collocations:

150 different POS sequences 10 most productive (75%)

ADJ ADV N nudo come un verme "as naked as a worm"

ADJ CONG ADJ bianco e nero "black and white"ADJ N terzo mondo "third world"N ADJ cassa comune "common fund"N CONG N andata e ritorno "back and forth"N N caso limite "borderline case"N PRE N abito da sera "evening dress"V ADJ stare zitto "keep quiet"V ART N fare la doccia "take a shower"V N avere paura "be afraid"

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Experimental methodology: 4 steps1. extraction of candidate collocations from corpus;2. filtering of the candidate collocations: frequency;3. filtering of the candidate collocations: dispersion;4. filtering of the candidate collocations: manual

ADJ CONG ADJN CONG NN NN PRE NV ART NV N

6 POS sequences

fictionpressacademic proseweb

12-million-word sample 4 corpus sections

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Collocations extraction + frequency

IMS Corpus Workbench removing all the candidates with frequency = 1

41643 collocations

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Dispersion

Examples: Aggrottare la fronte “to frown” (fiction) Vincere le elezioni “to win the elections” (press) Dare una definizione “to give a definition”

(academic prose)

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Dispersion

Juilland’s D value (Juilland - Chang-Rodriguez, 1964)

€

D =1 −σ

μ n −1, μ =

1

nxi

i=1

n

∑ , σ =xi − μ( )

2

i=1

n

∑n

.

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Dispertion + frequency D value: combined with frequency = usage

U = FD

Usage value ≥ 2: 2047 candidate collocations

Manual selection. Final result: list of 1553 word combinations = dictionary

entries

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Collocations list

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Compilation of the Dictionary Lexical database enriched with two kinds of

data: visible to the learner (client output)

definition, examples, part-of-speech, syntactic context of occurrence of collocations

to be processed by other applications (server) internal syntactic configuration for automatic

recognitionCollocation Syntactic configuration

Fare la doccia “take a shower”

[V$fare][ADV]? la|una|NUM [ADJ]? [N$doccia]

Abito da sera “evening dress”

[N$abito] da_sera

Alti e bassi “highs and lows”

alti_e_bassi

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DB integration in the VLE

Virtual Learning Environment: web application specifically devoted to language

learning LELE (Linguistically-Enhanced Learning

Environment) provide language learners with additional NLP

resources, in order to improve their linguistic competence

receptive and productive learning activities concerning the recognition and the active use of collocations

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LELE Features to automatically recognize and highlight multi-

word units in written Italian texts; to show additional linguistic information about

the selected collocations; to generate collocation tests for collocational

competence assessment of second language learners.

…

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LELE scheme

VLE

DB + tagger browser

server client

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Conclusions Next steps:

same methodology to the whole corpus, for all the 10 selected POS sequences

test of LELE system with students: starting january 2011

Further research refine statistical measures assign collocations to different levels of

competence other tools (productive tasks)

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Stefania SpinaE-learning and Language

TechnologiesUniversity for Foreigners Perugia,

Italy

stefania.spina@unistrapg.ithttp://april.unistrapg.it

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References Juilland, A & Chang-Rodriguez, E. (1964).

Frequency Dictionary of Spanish Words. The Hague: Mouton & Co

Meunier, F. & Granger S. (2008). Phraseology in foreign language learning and teaching. Amsterdam: John Benjamins

Nesselhauf, N. (2005). Collocations in a learner corpus. Amsterdam: John Benjamins

Pazos Bretaña, M. & Pamies Bertrán, A. (2008). Combined statistical and grammatical criteria. In S. Granger & F. Meunier (Eds), Phraseology. An interdisciplinary perspective. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 391-406.

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Backgroud: prototypical features

Tagliare la corda “run away”aprire la porta “open the door”

Camera oscura “dark room”

* Stanza oscura

{fare|porre|rivolgere|formulare} una domanda “ask a question”

Sistema *molto operativo “operating system”

fare una lunga, calda, riposante doccia “take a long, hot, restful shower”

semantic (non)-compositionality

(non)-substitutability

(non)-insertion of external items